Jimmy Fallon

NBC worried Jimmy Fallon’s boozing got ‘out of control’

Jimmy Fallon was warned to cut back on his boozing by NBC chiefs following a series of bizarre late-night accidents, according to multiple insiders.

An NBC insider said of the funnyman, “There were fears that Fallon was out of control and something could happen while he’s out drinking. Things got so serious at one stage that execs feared that Jimmy was splitting up with his wife over his drinking, but they patched things up.”

The beloved “Tonight Show” host’s recent allegedly alcohol-aided antics include tripping on a rug at home and nearly severing his ring finger on a table in June 2015.

Then he chipped his tooth “trying to open medicine for his injured finger” a few months later. In October 2015 he cut his hand on a bottle of Jägermeister. In September of this year a “very drunk” Fallon was seen alone at an NYC punk bar at 3 a.m, which sparked more NBC concerns.

N.S.A. Appears to Have Missed ‘Big Red Flags’ in Suspect’s Behavior

By Scott Shane and Jo Becker

WASHINGTON — Year after year, both in his messy personal life and his brazen theft of classified documents from the National Security Agency, Harold T. Martin III put to the test the government’s costly system for protecting secrets.

And year after year, the system failed.

Mr. Martin got and kept a top-secret security clearance despite a record that included drinking problems, a drunken-driving arrest, two divorces, unpaid tax bills, a charge of computer harassment and a bizarre episode in which he posed as a police officer in a traffic dispute. Under clearance rules, such events should have triggered closer scrutiny by the security agencies where he worked as a contractor.

From The New York Times.

Warren Hinckle

Peter Collier on the passing of Warren Hinckle:

When I joined Ramparts in 1966, Hinckle was already well on his way at age twenty-seven to becoming a living legend. While most of the staff came to work in street-fighter chic, he had his own homemade version of bella figura, showing up most days in a tie and three-piece suit, although sometimes changing pace with patent leather dancing pumps and a maroon velvet jacket. Jowly and plump and conveying an impression of fluid retention, he was an imperious alcoholic and only those who didn’t realize how Irish he was regarded it as paradoxical that he should become more fluent and inventive the more he drank, and that he never—even after several hours at Cookie Pacetti’s, the working-class watering hole where he went to escape intellectuals and politicos—appeared drunk.